Most people struggle with money.
That’s a fact.
Money is deeply intertwined with modern survival.
It impacts every single area of your life. Even if you aren’t thinking about money, you’re thinking about money. Your health depends on your money. The sanity of your relationships depends on a baseline amount of money.
You can say that that’s unfair and complain about how it should be different, but I heavily disagree.
I’m not here to tell you the truth of money was somehow “hidden” from you.
It’s your own fault you’re in this situation.
You didn’t question how you were raised, developed a terrible psychological relationship with money, and because of that you failed to understand that making money is a skill. You can make as much as you want, you just didn’t take the time to study, practice, and master that skill.
My goal for this letter is to install the right money programming in your head, as that’s the first step to making as much as you want.
Here’s what we’re going to talk about:
- Why money problems don’t exist but psychological problems do (and how to remove your scarcity mindset).
- The difference between a job, career, and calling so you can earn an income doing what you want.
- A new perspective on money, and how it’s your key to a fulfilling life (not the thing that’s preventing a fulfilling life).
- A complete breakdown of how to make money in any economic situation, because making money is a skill.
Face it.
You want freedom.
Well, maybe not complete freedom… we humans love structure and limitations (or else we’d already be free because freedom is mental).
At a minimum, you want autonomy.
The ability to choose your limitations.
By the end of this letter, you will have just that.
Subtle reminder:
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The Average Money Mindset
Money problems don’t exist. Psychological problems do.
Most people’s inability to make, keep, or smartly use money comes down to their beliefs, because your beliefs determine the opportunities you can notice to do those things.
Here’s a list of the average person’s beliefs around money:
- You believe money is hard to make.
- You don’t believe money is a domain of mastery like health, relationships, or your work.
- You may believe money is evil (because prior negative experiences programmed you).
- You aren’t interested in starting a business because you only see the vocal surface of sleazy salesmen and long work hours.
- You think everyone is trying to scam you, or that any non-mega corporation is a grifter (when they’re usually the independent businesses you say you support).
- You are stuck in survival mode, so you don’t see the importance of self-development or business and feel the urge to write them off to feel better about your own actions.
- You don’t think you can make a lot of money in your field, which is just plain false if you can simply observe the top earners in your field (hint: they have a business).
Every single one of these limits how much you make.
If you believe money isn’t a skill, you won’t learn that skill.
If you believe money is evil, you will be repulsed by the thought of making more (even if it’s your only way out of your self-induced chaos).
Your perception of money is determined by your level of development.
I have a concept of mine called the Levels Of Purpose.
The solution to your money problems (psychological problems) is to advance through each level.
The purpose of money changes as you develop yourself. It starts as a way to survive, becomes a method to acquire status, which leads to a desire for autonomy, then becomes a fuel for creativity and expression, then finally transforms into a way to help others advance through similar stages – related to money or not.
Those are the levels. Survival, status, autonomy, creativity, and contribution.
Survival
Every belief we listed above is pursuing the goal and purpose of survival.
Your main purpose is what determines how you perceive situations. You won’t notice a money-making opportunity in the survival stage because your attention is solely consumed by the house, the mortgage, being tired from your job, the relationship problems that splinter off because of those, and barely having enough money to think.
You take any job you can get because you have to survive. And at this point in your life, when your goals are the product of your conditioning, you don’t have many options for work you enjoy.
You escape the survival stage by becoming deeply aware of how your beliefs are holding you back. How they create a ripple effect of destruction in your life.
Then, you orient your focus toward solving the problems that reveal themselves, which at this stage, is almost always just “making more money.” And that’s okay. I would argue it’s necessary. You’re in this stage because you ignore – and potentially despise – the need for it.
Status
As we’ve discussed recently, there’s never been a time in history where weak, average, or mindless people weren’t treated like cattle. It can be infuriating that the only people who do well in society were those who gained power and influence.
You reach the status stage when (1) you have a sense of security around money and (2) you realize the need for others to perceive you as valuable.
You cultivate a skill set that allows you to get a better job or start a business. That job allows you to pay the bills, focus on other areas of your life, and make moderate to extravagant superficial purposes.
Many non-critical thinkers see this as bad, but they don’t understand perception or psychology. Humans must notice the surface before they notice the depth. I don’t care how “great of a personality” you have. People do care about looks before deciding to get into a relationship with them.
Creativity
Once you’ve achieved some level of status, your mind will start to transform.
You’ll begin to realize all of your mistakes.
Those mistakes are new problems to solve. A new purpose to pursue.
You may even feel the need to reject everything you’ve acquired.
You won’t find the same joy you used to in those superficial pursuits.
The money gets old. The sleeping around gets old. The cars and watches get old.
That doesn’t mean everything you did was a waste. You have a vast vat of experience to pull from and pass down to others.
You’ll start to crave autonomy. You’ll realize how slow the progression becomes as you advance higher in the status game and want to take on harder challenges.
At this point, your focus must shift to developing a philosophical sense of mastery around a few pursuits.
For bodybuilders, going to the gym starts as a pursuit to feel good about themselves. After a few years, they either quit or reorient toward a new, deeper destination that makes the journey more meaningful. They find joy in feeling good from healthy food. They have such a deep understanding of how their health choices impacts their future. They gain fulfillment from the process of making tiny improvements in the gym.
This is the creativity stage.
In the status stage, much of what you learn and do will be from what others teach you. What you absorbed to learn from others.
In the creativity stage, you take your expanded knowledge and begin to create your own way of doing things.
You’ve tried different training programs, business models, and coping strategies to the point of realizing the patterns and principles between them all. You’ve unlocked a level of mind that allows you to navigate with grace between them.
Your job in the creativity stage is to simply create.
Break free from the dogmas and ideologies and processes you’ve adopted from others. Build novel solutions from scratch. This sets you up nicely for the contribution stage.
Contribution
With a combination of a high-value skill set and enough creative experimentation, you realize that you can deeply impact others’ lives and feel the pull to do so.
You feel a deep desire to share the things that have improved your life.
You begin to see life from a new perspective and wonder why others are constantly distracted with menial things. You can see where their life is heading, but they can’t.
The contribution stage is where the used-to-be separate domains of your life collapse into one.
You don’t see work as somewhere that you clock in and clock out.
You don’t see rest as a treat that you can only indulge in once work is done.
You don’t see play as a hobby that lasts 30 minutes at night if you have the time to do it.
You see all of them as necessary counterbalances to one another.
Work, rest, and play become difficult to distinguish.
Rest becomes a way to regenerate your creative ability for your work. Play becomes what you do for work. Work is so deeply integrated with your life that anything you do can be passed down in the form of products or information.
Your entire life begins to revolve around how you can best contribute to the world.
You become a perspective vessel for reality. You make sense of the world from your mind and pass that perspective down for others to adopt and benefit from.
You hunt for and gather information, synthesize it with your experience, and distribute it to those who want to benefit from it.
You become less of a leech. You don’t only consume and take from reality for your selfish personal gain, but you create, share, and contribute back to the world.
A few last notes about these levels:
They reset when you start a business. When you quit your job to start your business, you’re back in survival mode. You need status to acquire the right connections and resources. You begin to crave autonomy from things like client work and tasks you can delegate. You free up mental energy to be creative. Eventually, you will realize that your main purpose is to help other people.
These levels of purpose follow the “transcend and include” law. You never “escape” the survival stage, you simply integrate it. You leverage it.
The Art Of Living Is Getting Paid To Play
Sensible people get paid to do what they enjoy. – Alan Watts
We have been conditioned since birth to work for everyone but ourselves.
We are given assignments, paths that have already been trodden.
We work on these assignments without struggle or conscious thought, leading to a mechanical and replaceable role in a society filled to the brim with people who try to prove their happiness to hide their internal misery.
We don’t know any better because all we know is what we’ve been told.
We are told to read books we don’t care about to complete projects we don’t care about to prepare ourselves for a life we don’t care about. Before you know it, you are trapped in a dense cloud of responsibilities. The resources – time, energy, and money – that could be used to change your life are exhausted like clockwork, so you have no choice but to remain a productive robot as society’s plan for you intended.
If you hate your work, and it comprises one-third of your life, and it drains your energy to enjoy the other third, and you are asleep the other third, there doesn’t seem to be a higher priority than to create, build, design, write, sell, invest, own, experiment, and discover a way to control what you do with your day.
What you will discover on your path to purposeful money is the difference between a job, a career, and a calling.
A job is some unpleasant work you do for someone else for the sole purpose of making money.
A job is a survival mechanism.
A job is one milestone on the path to living up to those who shaped your mind.
A job is similar to schools from the perspective that good marketing can make up for a bad product.
After centuries of failing to get results, they’re still alive and well for the simple reason that very few people go through the trouble of thinking for themselves. Most people do what most people do. Most people aren’t okay with the results of most people, but by that point, it’s much harder to escape.
A career is a commitment to development in your work.
A career demands that you pursue a hierarchy of challenging roles and tasks.
Psychologically, this brings long-term order and clarity to your mind.
With each level of challenge, life becomes more complex and interesting. New paths for knowledge and skill acquisition become apparent. If you want to progress further in a career, to an extent, you have to have your life together.
A calling is work you can’t pull yourself away from and others can’t help but pay you for.
A calling can’t be assigned to you.
A calling cannot be pursued under the orders of another.
A calling cannot be defined by a set amount of working hours because your mind is always working on it.
A calling is found at the point where improvement turns into obsession.
A calling is something others won’t understand. Something that must be cared for, protected, and maintained by the one pursuing it, like a gift that others could accidentally steal.
A job is not a career or calling, but a career and calling are both jobs. A career is not a calling, but a calling is a career.
Jobs are great for young people who don’t know what they want or simply need to survive.
Careers are great for those who want a bit more satisfaction in life, because they understand the need for challenging work as a forcing function for self-development.
A calling is for those who know they are meant for more.
The select few who are willing to take the plunge into the unknown and take full responsibility for the outcome of their life.
It’s a sad reality that the term work is now perceived as a curse. When the average person thinks about work, their mind floods with familiar pasts and predictable futures of stress, overwhelm, and anxiety.
When you are at work, you crave to be at rest. When you are at rest, you eventually crave to be at work. A disastrous cycle of never feeling like you are where you want to be.
Your mind is anywhere but the present moment.
People dream of the perpetual vacation we call retirement, but once they achieve that delusion, it normalizes as everything does.
Within a few weeks, you can’t help but want to balance being with doing.
It should be considered your full-time job to create work that feels like play.
To escape the narrow view that work is bad and money is evil.
If you’re stuck in a job or nearing the top of your career ladder, there is one thing that will launch you into your next phase:
Realizing that money is much, much more spiritual than you think.
Money Is More Spiritual Than You Think
We work and work and work until we earn enough to rest all to find ourselves unsatisfied with how much we have and how little we are.
We drown in survival mode.
We never succeed in seeing beyond the responsibilities we were assigned and accepted without question.
Wake up, go to work, deal with the boss, eat convenient foods because you don’t have the time, skip the good habits you promised yourself you would do because you don’t have the energy, watch your life slowly crash as your mind, body, and relationships unravel into chaos, and do nothing about it because it’s the only life you know.
Realize that work is a necessary part of life.
Work is about solving problems.
Humans love to solve problems, but not just any problem, problems we deem meaningful and interesting.
The right problems narrow our attention and allow us to forget our worries.
The wrong problems enslave our attention and amplify our worries.
The difference between the two is that one is chosen, and the other is assigned. Problems are the limits on your mind and potential. Once solved, they allow for growth, expansion, and evolution.
Money itself is a beautiful invention.
It has allowed us to transcend our survival through value exchange.
We each have problems that we value solving. So we solve them and soon have the desire to help someone solve them to. But since some people don’t have the time, skill, or desire, the invention of money allows them to have a different resource to solve the problem with (or at least make it much easier to solve).
So, if problems are the limits on your potential… the things that prevent you from reaching your next level of purpose, then money is a tool to achieve your potential.
Now, purpose doesn’t exist without problems.
By solving a problem, you pursue a purpose. You discover your part in something greater than yourself. That’s what spirituality is. Discovering your part in the whole, transcending that whole to the next, and then the next until you reach your life’s purpose of contribution.
Most people in business are trapped in the survival and status stage.
That’s why you see them as unspiritual.
But business is simply a legal structure to distribute value. Not all businesses are evil, but not starting your own ensures that the evil ones thrive.
When you are in the survival or status stage, by not starting a business, you are bound to unconsciously contribute to the businesses you deem as evil by working for a corporation that sickens the masses.
To wrap this up, if your life’s purpose is to contribute to humanity, pursuing your calling (not a job or career as an endpoint) is a part of that. And your calling will almost always be pursued with your own business.
Making Money Is A Skill, Not Luck
Making money is not about luck.
We’re far beyond that silly belief.
We don’t live in that world anymore.
Luck is a concept used to describe a lack of understanding of a system.
If you understand the system of making money, you can make it at will (considering you actually learn the skills).
Here’s exactly what you need to understand to make as much money as you want.
1) Understand the psychology of one person, preferably yourself.
Where does money come from?
I’m not talking about how the government prints it.
I’m talking about how does it get into your hands?
Someone gives it to you.
That’s the answer.
Whether it comes from a consumer or a business, somebody makes the decision to hand you money because they see what you have to offer as valuable.
The first step to creating something worth paying for is to understand the psychology of one person. Value is perception.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Many people will see what you offer as trash.
But you don’t see it that way, and there are hundreds of thousands of people like you.
Build a product for yourself.
Market to yourself.
Write to yourself.
Attract people like you, because that’s who you can help the most.
2) Create a solution to a biological, personal, professional, or social problem.
Most businesses fail because they try to solve a problem they haven’t experienced.
They spin up some fancy startup idea in their head, and then justify their failure with a dumb statistic like “99% of startups fail.”
If you pigeon-hole yourself into a narrow niche and problem you don’t have experience with, there isn’t really a path out of that. This is why I recommend becoming the niche, because your business is only limited by your ability to develop yourself. Your products evolve as you do.
You build an audience around your name. You test ideas with content. You turn those best ideas into products. You improve your products or create new ones until it succeeds. You can’t really fail if you are the business, because you’re in full control of your improvement.
The best path for a beginner to take is one that is accessible and low-cost.
In the age of the internet, that means digital products and services.
For people who don’t know how to code, that means:
- Courses
- Coaching
- Templates
- Workshops
- Live events
- Etc
My favorite type of education product is a course curriculum paired with worksheets or resources that you can build inside of Notion or Kortex.
You can build these products fast.
You can test whether they will do well or not by writing content and studying how well people engage with it.
From there, if the product does well, you can enjoy the high profit margins for as long as you want or turn it into another business.
Like how 2 Hour Writer turned into Kortex because Notion didn’t cut it for me as a writer.
But what do you build the product around?
A problem you’ve solve in your life.
What is a domain of life you’ve mastered?
What do you love to study and learn about?
What skills have you acquired that helped you live a better life or get a better career?
Build a product around that.
Teach people everything they need to now to reach the same goals you have.
If you need help, research what other people like you are selling.
Could you create the same thing, but better?
3) Build, borrow, or buy an audience comprised of people with the same psychology and problem.
You have something that people want. Now you need the people side of that equation.
Most beginners fall into the trap of building a website, perfecting their product, forming an LLC, and the rest but never get around to the most important part:
Customers.
There are 3 types of distribution.
Built, borrowed, and bought.
You build distribution on something like social media and an email list. This is something you own and can promote your value to at any time. It is the highest leverage of the bunch.
You borrow distribution by networking with other people. Showing up as a podcast guest and getting thousands of eyes on you. Writing guest newsletters for people with large lists. Posting on forum sites or communities. Etc.
You buy distribution with sponsorships and advertisements. Podcast sponsorships, newsletter sponsorships, Google ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, etc.
In an optimal world, you would do all of them. But you only have so much time on your hands and so much money to hire other people (if you even want to do that).
In my eyes, the best option for a beginner is to build an audience.
Why?
Because it’s free to start.
Because you have to learn how to capture attention and persuade. You have to learn the skills that will make your borrowed and bought distribution a success.
And of course, you get to keep the audience. They follow you for you. You can be more authentic and purposeful.
If you want to learn how to do this, watch my One Person Business playlist on YouTube, or consider purchasing 2 Hour Writer (writing is how you build an audience).
4) Systemize the promotion and delivery of the solution to that audience.
People will ask me why they aren’t making money with their creative work.
99% of the time they stopped doing the things that made them money in the first place.
They stopped promoting.
They stopped trying to get customers.
They didn’t create a repeatable weekly system that they can test and improve.
Here’s an example for a creator business:
- Promote your product, service, lead magnet, or newsletter every single day under one post. This can be in the comments of that post or in your story.
- Send a weekly newsletter and promote your product or service once in there.
- Actively talk to 5-10 people a week in your DMs about your product.
Now, you have social media traffic going to your products and email list.
Your email list provides value and promotes your products.
Once that is set, all you have to do is worry about growing your audience and email list.
Of course, you can also launch new products to see a substantial spike in sales and give more options to your audience (because one product will only benefit a certain part of that audience).
I’ve talked about this in Zero To $1 Million As A One-Person Business.
5) Iterate and persist.
To recap on how to make as much money as you want:
- Understand your own mind so you can market to someone that is similar to you.
- Turn the skills, knowledge, and interests that benefit your life into an education product.
- Distribute that product to an audience that you build with content and writing.
- Create a weekly system to ensure that your audience sees your product.
That’s it.
That’s all you need to make as much money as you want.
The final piece of the puzzle is the delicate balance of iteration and persistence. This is where most people fail.
There are 4 points above.
Each of those points provide data.
If something isn’t working, you need to test something new.
Test new marketing angles (use personal experience to market how your product changed your own life) and gauge the response.
Test how effective your product is at solving the problem in others lives. Improve it until people can’t stop talking about it.
Test the ideas, content, and strategies you use to build an audience. If you aren’t growing, it’s because you haven’t done this. Your skill isn’t high enough.
Test how, when, and how often you promote your product each week until you make the amount of sales you want.
This whole business thing doesn’t stop when you decide on one marketing angle, one product, one strategy for audience growth, and one way to promote.
You can’t fail if you have all of the right pieces and experiment until they work.
Thank you for reading this letter.
I hope it helped.
– Dan
